When you get hit with incurable, degenerative, and progressive diseases, you would probably say, “Why me?”. The life you believed you would have ends with the diagnosis. The person you have been dies with the diagnosis. You don’t know what you could expect for the future, except for the fact you would lose everything you thought you would have.
Why me? We don’t have any answer to that question. My friend, Maria, was diagnosed with ALS and passed away within a year. Every day she lost some of her function. She said that somebody told her that the Universe/God had chosen her because she was strong enough to handle it. “I didn’t want to be chosen for this,” she said. It was the most cruel answer to the question.
I have a friend who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Once an epitome of fitness, he had worked in the fitness industry for the entire life, training diligently. He is losing his physical function. He didn’t do anything wrong to deserve it. “Why me?” he must have asked.
I have a friend with scleroderma. Her physical movements are limited and is constantly fighting against its progression. Mundane issues of life, such as dentistry treatment, become huge challenges. She must have asked, “Why me?”
All of them are strong and facing the challenges. They are wonderful people. Why them? There are no answers.
If you don’t have any of these disease, you would never think, “Why not me?”
When I was hit with Meniere’s Disease, I cried out, “Why me?” Meniere’s Disease is incurable and degenerative. It is rather unpredictable than progressive. I couldn’t leave home without the fear of severe attacks, which would render me incapacitated. I lost the life I expected to have, bedridden most of days. I am tenacious by nature, so I fought to regain my function with teeth and claws. Did I do anything to deserve it? Actually I did. Eventually I figured out the trigger. It was my genetics and lifestyle that triggered it. Even though Meniere’s Disease is incurable, I am managing it with very strict lifestyle change and am currently in remission.
Now when I think about my friends with ALS, Parkinson’s, Scleroderma and other incurable, degenerative, progressive diseases, I think, “Why not me?”
I am dodging the bullet every day, every moment, as they are stealing every single day from the illness.
So, if you don’t have these illness, you are blessed. Be grateful and savor every moment of your life. You are probably dodging bullets without knowing it.
I walked into the gross anatomy lab at a medical school, wearing a brand-new white lab coat, and stood at one of the dissection tables. The steady hum of the air purifier filled the room. Under the gleaming florescent lights, the lab appeared sterile and lifeless. It held multiple tables, each with a cadaver lying upon it. It was my first human dissection class, and I was nervous. Unless you are a medical student, funeral director, coroner, forensic examiner, or some kind of specialist, you rarely have the chance to see naked dead bodies quietly resting on stainless steel tables. The cadavers were embalmed for preservation, giving their skin somewhat foreign texture.
In my old country, we don’t have the custom of embalming. When my grandmother passed away, she was laid on a futon in her home, as if she were sleeping, and family members took turns staying beside her body through the night. It is an old tradition for family members to spend the last night with a loved one—a way to familiarize the living with death. I stayed with her body for several hours, keeping incense burning. Her skin was yellowish, wrinkled, and dry but otherwise intact. The cold air from the dry ice, used to slow the body’s decomposition, seeped through the futon, carrying with a faint, distinct whiff of death.
In the lab, the cadavers’ skin was unnaturally moist due to the embalming fluid saturating their tissue. We carefully observed the artifacts of death and embalming process to distinguish them from the inherent characteristics of the deceased. The outer layer of skin was peeling in patches, similar to sunburned skin but slightly deeper. This is a decomposition process where the bond between dermis and epidermis begins to break down. One of the cadavers was a dark-skinned man, and we were startled to see the pale skin layer beneath. We realized the skin color is only epidermis deep. Beneath the epidermis layer, we are all same color: pale and fair.
The epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, is only 0.05mm (on the eyelids) to 1.5mm (on the palm and sole) in thickness. It defines our social identity, being the first aspect others notice. It is a social organ. As a person of east Asian origin, my skin has an olive tint. When I was a child, I spent most of my time outdoors and became tanned in the areas exposed to the sun. Naturally I was darker than adults who spent most of their time indoors. My father used to tell me I was too dark to be considered pretty. In my old country, at least at that time, fair skin was idealized as a standard of beauty for women; the lighter, the better. My skin is still tanned, though not as much as when I was younger. In fact, the parts of my body that rarely see sunlight are as fair as those of my friends with natural light skin. I simply don’t burn as easily as they do. Being labeled as an “Asian girl too dark to be pretty” haunted my self-image, even though it was just an epidermis-deep judgement, easily shed like a snake’s slough when it no longer fits. Today, I am a proud woman of a certain advanced age with beautifully tanned skin, less sun-damaged than that of some fair-skinned friends.
Melanocytes, located in the bottom layer of epidermis, produce melanin, which determines skin color. Without the epidermis, you would be pale. Defining people by skin color is absurd. Melanin protects the skin from UV damages caused by sunlight. A darker skin color simply means your skin is more tolerant to UV exposure.
In the living body, the deepest layer of the epidermis, where melanocytes reside, is firmly attached to the dermis and does not peel away easily. Since the epidermis lacks sensory nerve endings — except for vibration-sensing Merkel cells, which are found in the bottom layer— touching the epidermis itself does not produce sensations. However, there is a rare genetic disorder in which the bond between the dermis and epidermis is very weak, causing the epidermis to peel away with the slightest contact, exposing nerve endings. Individual with this condition are vulnerable to UV damage, infections, and other external threats. Imagine being without an epidermis. Every slightest touch would cause excruciating pain, and your existence would become a constant agony. When I studied psychology in a post-graduate psycho-spiritual counseling program, the instructor described a person with borderline personality disorder as “being without skin.” The analogy might be more accurately described as a condition of being without an epidermis.
The epidermis forms the boundary between what is me and what is not me, serving as the first line of defense by protecting what is inside from the external environment. Despite its crucial role, it is less than 1mm thick. Our physical existence is remarkably vulnerable in this way.
When I get a temporary henna tattoo, the “tattoo” fades away in a week or two because the pigment only penetrates the epidermis. The outermost layer of the epidermis, the stratum corneum, consists of dead cells that are constantly flaking away. The cells in the outer layer of epidermis are replaced every thirty to forty days. Part of us is constantly dying from birth. Our physical existence is not as separate as we might believe. When I step into a subway car, I sometimes encounter a distinct smell associated with a particular human state. Even if the source is no longer present, the oder lingers as if the ghost of its presence remains. Occasionally, we find ourselves in someone else’s personal space, and as I inadvertently breathe in tiny molecules of oder, I also realize I am inhaling minuscule flakes of dead epidermis.
As a manual therapist, when I touch a client, I make contact with their epidermis. I would never touch their dermis, the true skin, directly. Between “them” and “me,” the epidermis stands guard, keeping “not me” out. Every caress of lovers passes through the layer of dead cells. Flaked-off dead cells mingle with other minute substances, floating away in the air or settling on the floor. This thin, evanescent boundary keeps us safe from one another.
The first difference between a living person and a cadaver lies in the skin. In the dissection lab, we stood around a table with a cadaver. No one touched it until the instructor encouraged us to do so. Initially, most of us hesitated, but soon we began to touch the cadaver quite aggressively. The cadaver allowed us to explore in whatever way necessary for study. A person has boundaries; a cadaver does not. When somebody violates your boundaries through inappropriate touching, they are treating you as if you were a cadaver.
Imagine yourself as a corpse lying on the ground. Focus on the outermost layer of your skin. Peeling away in patches, this interface with society falls off. It becomes desiccated and papery—light and fragile. Part of your identity sheds away, your boundary dissipating with a mere whiff.
I am not writing an anatomy book, nor a dissection manual, though I use nomencIature of anatomist when it is more clear than everyday language. This book/writing is not about scientific knowledge. If you want to learn detailed anatomical information, there are tons of great books you can choose from. This is just A story of my personal experience facing cadavers in dissection labs, and a story about how that experience has affected my perception of who I am, how I relate to everything, especially to my body, in this lifetime.
I once read about a meditation technique where you lie on your back and imagine your body gradually decomposing until it becomes a skeleton. I heard that in Buddhism there is a meditation method in which one observes one’s own body both from the inside and outside while observing an actual corpse decompose. I liked this meditation method because I interpreted it as a training to realize that all material existence in this world, including one’s own body, is a mere phenomenon, just like a decaying corpse.
When we experience unbearable trauma, our body and consciousness may become dissociated in order to protect ourselves. The body becomes a thing that performs a specific function, and becomes separated from the ”I” consciousness.
Once I had sessions with a Zen psychology therapist. He often asked me, “What do you feel in your body?” I looked up at the ceiling, looked around the room and always looked for the answer outside of my body. “Can you feel your feet on the floor?” he asked. Of course I could feel my feet physically touching the floor, but that was completely disconnected from what I was feeling mentally.
I didn’t have much knowledge about my own body. So even when I meditated on a corpse, I couldn’t visualize it very well, and I had no conscious connection to my body, so the corpse quickly turned into abstract bones. I couldn’t understand how complex and delicate the human body was, and how it was related to my very existence.
Through the gross anatomy training, I gradually recovered the connection between my self and my body. Every time I stood at the dissection table, I felt like I was slowly regaining my humanity. It has been more than 10 years since I was initiated into human dissection, and I have spent over 1,500 hours in dissection labs. Now attending an annual dissection workshop is like a Zen practitioner regularly practicing at a temple.
I see it as my spiritual practice. It prepares me for the reality of death and dying, and reminds me of the meaning of living this moment.
Savasana in yoga is said to be a pose where you lie on your back and imitate a dead body. When we go to a dissection table in a dissection lab, we face a donated body that is quietly in Savasana pose. It is the last pose we all will take.
I watched Split and Glass on Netflix, where a fictional character with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) develops a personality with superhuman strength. James McAvoy was phenomenal, shifting seamlessly from one persona to another on screen. The story is a textbook case of severe childhood trauma: the psyche fractures to protect the vulnerable self. One of his identities, “The Beast,” punishes the undamaged—those who haven’t suffered. [Spoiler Alert] The Beast sees the damaged as pure.
That’s what drew me in.
I have a friend with DID. Sarah is brilliant, cultured, well-read, and funny. She took many younger, “damaged” women under her wing. She was the one who introduced me to Broadway, gifting me tickets to Sondheim. We’d sit in cafes, visit restaurants, and talk about arthouse films and everything else. Her life sounded like a novel. She told me she was one of the first female TV producers—or something close. I’m not sure if Sarah is the original. I met two of her other selves: Tommy, a boy who constantly said, “Sorry,” and another, terrifying one—probably her internalized mother.
The switches weren’t as clean as in the movies. She once said she had a “Flat Earth Committee” in her head, which decided what she could or couldn’t do. That committee often said she wasn’t allowed to leave her apartment.
Before her DID diagnosis, she’d been given a charcuterie board of mental health labels: agoraphobia, depression, anxiety disorder. She’d been prescribed all kinds of medications. None of them helped.
Many friends tried to help her. After all, when she showed up as “Sarah,” she was wonderful. But over time, that became rarer.
I was the last one who tried hard. I had this urge to rescue someone else—maybe instead of rescuing myself. Her disorders were inflated versions of mine, so I could speak her language to a certain extent.
I don’t have DID. I’ve been dissociated, but not to that degree. I had dysthymia and episodes of major depression. Sometimes I wasn’t “allowed” to get out of bed. I had extremely low self-esteem and poor communication skills—unless I was in a professional setting. Then I became articulate, competent, impressive. I still have a voice inside that occasionally whispers, “Jump” or “Kill yourself.”
Over time, I realized that some of Sarah’s other personalities were sabotaging anything that might make her better. Whenever she admitted to feeling improvement, they lashed back—as if healing would erase them. As if their survival depended on her staying damaged. Ironically, their original role had been to protect her.
They exhausted me, as they had exhausted many before me.
I haven’t seen Sarah in years. She reaches out once in a blue moon—only in moments of desperation. The last time, it wasn’t even her. A mutual friend contacted me because no one had heard from her. Turned out she’d fallen and been hospitalized. She didn’t have her phone in the hospital room, so she couldn’t reach anyone. But she came up with an ingenious solution: she befriended the woman in the next bed and asked her husband to deliver a handwritten note to my building.
That’s Sarah—resourceful and fiercely capable when it matters. She once told me she’d made a deal with the “committee” to keep her alive. One of her friends with DID had died by suicide. Sarah wasn’t going to be one of them.
Eventually, I accepted Sarah as she is. There’s no “original” Sarah waiting to be recovered. She was already many when I met her. I just didn’t know it. She contains multitudes. Every piece of her is my friend. And I’ve let go of the childish fantasy that I could save her—or anyone else.
Everyone splits, to some degree.
There are incidents I don’t remember, but my body seems to. I don’t have a single, monstrous trauma, just layers: a verbally and emotionally—possibly sexually—abusive father; a manipulative, passive-aggressive mother; a narcissistic aunt; a silent, possibly borderline grandmother. Add to that a culture soaked in misogyny, inappropriate touches, and the absence of loving contact—and I was left scarred.
I didn’t split, but I did build personas: a tough bitch and an abrasive man—my internalized father—to protect the vulnerable child inside me.
I’ve spent decades re-parenting that little girl. I wanted her to grow up into who she could have been if she had been loved and left alone: a happy, loving, beautiful girl. A confident, capable woman who could love and be loved.
I didn’t become exactly what I hoped—but I like who I’ve become. I’m happy with this version of myself.
You can’t restore the original child. But you can hold your scars with tenderness. You can carry your pain gently, like something sacred. And in doing so, you become who you were always meant to be:
Clean and pure, with old scars. Survive. Then thrive.
My high school best friend recommended me to watch a Japanese drama series, titled Brush Up Life. It is a story of a young woman, who suddenly died in a freak accident. She arrived at the reception desk of the “upstairs” office. A clerk at the desk told her she was assigned to re-incarnate as a giant anteater. She refused to be reborn as a giant anteater and asked the alternative option. The clerk told her that she could redo her life from the birth with her current knowledge and consciousness. The woman chose to start over and changed her life as she went. To make a long story short, every time she started over, something didn’t work and she died. So she kept going back to the start. Eventually she got the result she wanted (she saved her friends’ life).
My friend asked me if I could start over with current consciousness intact, what would I do. I thought about changing this and that. I would be on SSRI as soon as it’s available–I wasn’t diagnosed until in late 30s and I had developed a basketful of disorders. I would focus on physical fitness –I had eating disorder and was out of shape, a heavy smoker with alcohol dependency. I would move to the U.S. as soon as possible–I moved here in my late 20s and didn’t know my old country’s restrictive culture had traumatized me. I would study harder to get in a medical school –I applied for but wasn’t accepted and instead went to study liberal arts.
Then I realized I would be born into the same family and would have to do it all over again. The heroine of the drama has a “normal enough” and functional enough family. She tries to change things to save others. I can’t change my dysfunctional family. I can’t change how my parents deal with me. I would be born into the same family with all the pain, fear, shame, and anger. No. I would rather be a Giant Anteater. It would be much better.
My friend said she wanted to change one event, which traumatized and defined her life. Her parents moved from a metropolitan area to a rural city due to her father’s job and she was transferred from a private school in a large city to a local public middle school in a pretty tough district, where she was bullied as an outsider. She still can’t get over the trauma. She is now a professor of psychiatry at a local medical school, established and lives in a large house. She is married, has two sons, and they both are well-respected medical doctors. She has grandchildren, who live in the same city. I am freelancing, living in a small apartment with an old dog. I’m divorced with no children. From outside, she seems to have a good enough life. Still, she wanted to change.
I’ve been thinking about starting over, but every time I think of it, I end up choosing a giant anteater. I had a volatile life and I wish I could choose differently here and there, but if I changed any event I wouldn’t be able to be here. Every mistake I made, every bad choice I made, it was a ferry to carry me here and now. I have realized I am very content and happy with who I am now.
I just spend much of my life in constant stormy weather, hanging onto whatever I could to survive. And the deadly wind and current pushed the boats, ferry, or sometimes just a wooden lifesaver to where I am now.
So it’s possible to make peace with your life. I never expected to have this calm ordinary days at the end. (Of course, I spent large sum of money and time on this and that therapy.)
If by chance I talk a little wild, forgive me; I had it from my father.
— HENRY VIII, ACT 1 SCENE 4
My childhood home was not a happy place. I didn’t know how being loved felt like. My younger brother told me once he made his presence as sparse as possible to avoid unpleasant encounters, well, mostly with our father. He also told me he had never felt loved by our father. When he was a pre-teen boy, he was always attached to our mother, like a baby monkey, while I don’t remember my mother’s touch. I had never felt loved by her, either.
My parents fed, clothed, and provided a bed and more than enough schooling. So I wasn’t neglected and was physically well cared for.
After multiple of failed relationships, I realized I didn’t know how love feels like. I didn’t have felt sense or reference point of being loved. I still don’t grasp the idea of being loved for just being me. I have to be needed and useful for the other person to be loved. That’s my false belief. Becoming aware of it was a great step.
My father passed away about 10 years ago after suffering Alzheimer’s disease. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in early 30s and he was insulin dependent for most of my life. His father and his older sister died young from complication of diabetes. There are many diabetics in his family.
After more than half a century of dodging genetic bullets, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and since I can’t take medications due to a severe and weird side effect from raised insulin level, I have been controlling it by diet and exercise only. Currently I wear CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and I finally understand what my father was going through.
I remember he said that he never enjoyed eating. He considered it as a bitter medicine. Even though he was on insulin, he was on tight calorie deficient diet. Our family never enjoyed dining out because of his diet restrictions. I always thought I didn’t want to be like him. So I enjoyed eating a lot. Now I am on a very strict diet. I can’t eat anything which I used to love–ice cream, cheesecakes, chocolates, sweet fruits, pasta, rice, pancakes… I don’t enjoy eating out with friends, because I can’t eat most of what they eat. I’ve learned that my blood glucose level dictates my moods. My father’s diet was not as scientific as mine. It was just a guess work and he was so disciplined. He needed to if he wanted to live. Now I am also disciplined regarding what I eat because I want to function.
It also dawned on me that my father must have experienced no felt sense of love. He used to say his mother, my grandmother, had loved his older brother, but never loved him. He didn’t know how love feels like. I had never felt sense of love from my grandmother, either. She cared for me when I was a little girl, but I didn’t get the sense of love. It didn’t start with me. And if you have not felt loved by your parents, it’s almost impossible to love yourself. I used to hate myself.
Fortunately my dogs taught me how loving and being loved feels like in my body. I remember my father used to take home a puppy and took care of it. The dog might have been the only thing he could feel love.
I don’t have children and it’s a good thing. Neither my brother. At least it stops with us.
If your family is loving, make sure to teach your daughters and sons to stay away from those who don’t know love. They could often be very attractive in a way only damaged people could be.
The young woman walked straight to me and introduced herself. “Hi. I’m a survivor,” she said. “Hi,” I said.
It wasn’t a meeting for survivors of any kind. It was just a shamanistic drumming circle gathering. I was in a process of healing journey and was trying out many modalities. At that time, I was highly sensitive to other people’s emotional state and somehow my attention was habitually drawn to traumatized people’s energy. Even before she talked to me, I sensed a tightly wound vortex with thousands of black birds swarming against the dark sky and the vortex was walking toward me.
No, I don’t want to be sucked in that, I thought.
I was taken aback that the woman introduced herself to a total stranger as a survivor. I don’t remember if she said what kind of survivor she was. However, my mind interpreted as a child sexual abuse survivor. The fact she identified herself as a survivor made me think hard. She had chosen that word to define her state of being.
During the drumming, my attention was relentlessly drawn to the woman. No, I don’t want to be sucked in that, I thought again. I could sense that she was looking for a “hook” in people around her. She was looking for a survivor to share the vortex with.
After the gathering, I told my friend about the woman and asked, “Did I look like that?”
Do I look like that? Is a survivor my identity? Does that word represents my entire state of being? I had to think hard because I saw myself in her. Trauma walking, vulnerable and dangerous at the same time.
When there are predators outside of the room, we need to survive. Our sympathetic nervous system needs to be on high alert, like a tightly wound vortex. Once the predators outside of the room leave, we can unwind (deactivate) the sympathetic nervous system. For some of us, the predator is inside the room. We carry the predator with us.
After decades of therapy and numerous healing works, I don’t carry the predator with me anymore. I survived but I don’t define myself as a survivor. The trauma doesn’t define me.
“I was a slob,” I said, “I knew the drawer of the dresser was half open and I couldn’t close it. It must take nothing to close it, but I couldn’t. So it would be half-open for weeks, months.”
Mia’s younger sister, Norma, has been suffering Depression on and off for a while and occasionally locks herself in. Mia was planning to visit her parents and to stay at her sister’s place. “What should I do to help her?” she asked. She knows I have a clinical Depression and often asks advice from me for her sister. Mia is that kind of person who always tries to offer solutions to “problems,” to fix.
“I think I should tell her to stop taking medications,” she said.
“NOOOOO!” I said. “That’s the worst thing for a Depressed person!”
At one point, I felt so great and I stopped taking SSRI without consulting my shrink. (My shrink thought I had a hypomania episode.) I quickly fell into a state of Major Depression and didn’t go out of my apartment (except for bare necessities. I’m not agoraphobic. I just didn’t have the will to move.) During the three months, I was diagnosed with a variety of mood disorders and prescribed different medications, which made my condition much worse. Nothing stuck, well, except for the original straight forward SSRI. Eventually I came out of Depression organically and since then I’ve been on the same SSRI, currently with a minimal dosage.
“I take it for the rest of my life. I can’t risk having another episode,” I said. “It’s like you have a bad eye sight. You need to wear contact lenses just for functioning normally. Nobody tells you you shouldn’t wear contact lenses. You might fall into a manhole.”
“My sister doesn’t answer our calls, doesn’t respond to texts. We are sure she has read our messages… My elder sister thinks Norma is irresponsible. She doesn’t even care how our parents are doing..,” Mia said.
“It’s not that she won’t. I she can’t. Any contacts from others are threatening. When you have a migraine attack, any noises, any flash of lights would hurt badly. Phone calls and messages are like that. Especially messages to blame her or tell her to do something,” I explained. When I was depressed, every time I got a message, I felt like I heard a gun shot. Mia’s family bombards Norma with messages. “That’s the worst thing. I would feel like I want to cover myself with a blanket, in a fetal position,” I said.
“So what should we do?”
“Is she still seeing her psychiatrist?”
“I think she is,” Mia said.
“If so, just let her know you are there for her when she is ready to come out of the cave. Just send a message saying that you are thinking about her.”
Every time I talk to Mia about Depression, I am made to be aware how little “normal” people know how it feels. Many people around me have Depression with varying degree and we don’t have to explain to each other. We speak the same language of pain. It’s refreshing to realize it is not a universal state of being.
So I explained how I am when I am depressed.
“Norma is like that. She used to be very neat and tidy. But last time I visited her, her apartment was in a mess. She left dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. I thought she became lazy,” Mia said.
“It’s not that she is lazy. Depression is like having oven mitts on. It becomes very difficult to do anything with oven mitts on. Without them, it’s nothing to pick up a piece of scrap paper from the floor. With them, it takes tremendous time and energy just to do that. We see it and we know it’s there and we don’t have energy to pick it up. Then another piece of scrap falls on it, and another… Eventually we get buried in trash and can’t even move. That’s how Depression feels like.”
I don’t know if Mia understands. It’s damn difficult to clean with oven mitts on. So be compassionate to yourself. You are not lazy.
If I should get totally paralyzed and lose my independence, do I want to live? If I have a choice, what would I do? I thought it was no brainer. I would certainly choose to end my life.
Then, my friend, Maria, was diagnosed with ALS. It is a cruel disease. She had been independent and lived alone. She didn’t have close family except for her elderly mother. She lost her mobility quickly and became dependent on friends. Within 6 months, she was admitted in a hospital and had to make a decision. She had to choose. If she chooses life prolonging measures, she would be bed-ridden for the rest of her life, which she wouldn’t know how long, and would have to depend on public assistance. She wouldn’t be able to move, eat, nor talk. She would have to wear a diaper, breathe through a respirator, be fed via a gastrostomy feeding tube… All of us, members of volunteer care team of her friends, thought it was no brainer. Nobody would be able to take care of her forever. One of her friends had a mother with ALS. She begged her mother to choose to live even in locked-in condition and she now regretted that. It’s cruel, she said.
Maria couldn’t make a choice for a long time. Eventually, she chose not to. She was admitted to a hospice and passed away peacefully in a couple of weeks. (So I was told.)
It’s no brainer, isn’t it?
It was until I heard a story about a nurse. I don’t remember where I heard or read, but it totally changed my perspective. The story was told by a husband of a nurse, who became paralyzed or immobile. When she was healthy, she had always told her family she would choose not to receive any life-prolonging measures.
She once happened to be at the scene of a serious accident. The injured person needed medical attention. As a nurse, she could tell he would surely be fully paralyzed, worse would stay in coma, or brain-damaged, and for a moment she hesitated to give an assistance to save the life. Of course, as a nurse, she provided necessary help and that person lived, with the predicted consequence. Since then she thought about her moment of choice again and again, and she concluded that she wouldn’t want to live in that condition.
So when it was her turn to choose, her husband and her children were sure that she would say no to life prolonging measures. She didn’t and they were surprised. They respected her choice and took care of her for the next several months.
Then, one day, finally she said it was enough.
What her husband said hit me hard. It’s not a question of if you want to live. It’s a question of if you want to see tomorrow. It’s not that she wanted to live in that state of being for the rest of her life. She just wanted to see tomorrow. She wanted to see her husband and her children smile tomorrow. She wanted to see the sun rise tomorrow.. She wanted to feel the air, she wanted smell the rain, she wanted to feel the warmth of sun, tomorrow.
Do I want to see tomorrow?
When I am seriously/clinically depressed, tomorrow does not exist. I am in a timeless state of pain. I become pain. I desperately search for the way to stop the pain, which lasts forever, because time stops when I am in major depression. We only are in now and here in hell. (That’s quite zen, isn’t it? ) So only thing I can think of is how to stop being myself. A depressed person doesn’t have tomorrow. That’s the tragedy.
So I constantly ask myself, ‘Do I want to see tomorrow?” And I am glad my answer was yes yesterday.
My high school bestie, Suki, who is now a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, once told me about her young patient, who killed himself while she was away for a conference. She told me that he was doing much better in the last session. “It’s because he had already made up his mind,” I said. “He made peace. Once somebody made up his mind, nobody can stop it and I guess for that person the life was too painful and if so, I can’t find a way to tell the person to live.”
“But it’s his illness that made him kill himself,” Suki said. And I have been thinking about what she said for a long time. I am not suicidal per se, but have been thinking about killing myself since I was 8 years old. The thought has never left me. It’s just how I am. I have been on SSRI for almost 30 years on and off and after the last bout of major depression, I accepted that I needed to be on meds for life just to live normally.
I explained my friend that when I was in major depression, there were no line of demarcation between who I was and the illness, ie. depression. I am not in pain. I become pain. It’s not that I want to kill myself. I just want the pain disappear. I just want to have peace from who I am.
Fortunately, when I am in major depression, I can’t initiate any major action. I just passively exist with minimal action for survival. So I am not suicidal. I am now stable and am quite happy about my life. I can not be sure but It could get better as you age.
Then I got Meniere’s Disease. Meniere’s Disease is an illness. It is a condition I have. It is definitely not who I am. When I have an acute episode, I scream in my mind, “Kill me now!” I am in tremendous pain and suffering and I want to have it stopped. But I don’t wish to die because I know once I recover after 12 to 24 hrs, I will be my usual self.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if I could survive another bout of major depression. After being depressive for half a century, I sometimes feel tired. I wonder if the day would come when I feel too tired to keep on going. But it would not be because of Meniere’s disease. It would be because who I am.
To younger suffers of major depression, I want to tell you it could get better. I didn’t imagine I could have this peaceful life when I was younger and tormented. It could get better.
Somatic Awareness 